THE NATION AND GLOBALIZATION

Eric Hobsbawm

1
We are today living in an era of globalization. By this I mean a state of affairs in
which the globe is the essential unit of operation of some human activity, and
where this activity is ideally conducted in terms of single, universal, systems of
thought, techniques and modes of communication. Other particularities of those
who engage in such activities, or of the territories in which they are conducted,
are troublesome or, at best, irrelevant. Thus world air travel is possible because of
a number of arrangements which link all airports and airlines of the globe, and
which are handled in a standardized manner everywhere and, in fact, with the use
of a single language of communication for all essential technicians anywhere in
the world, for example aircraft controllers, namely, English. A major aircrash
happened recently because a Kazakh pilot was unable to understand the English
command given by a Delhi air-controller.
But a “nation,” however we define it, is by definition exclusive and particular.
It is always recognizable by not being another nation. To this extent it is by defin-
ition not global. This is both objectively and subjectively so. From the national
point of view, the “nation” is primary and qualitatively unique. From the global
point of view, it is just one component among many others of the total system. It
may be quantitatively more or less important, but qualitatively all nations are
equal. The question I will discuss today is how the “nation” fits into, or does not
fit into, the globalized world of today and the even more globalized world of
tomorrow. Or, conversely, how that world adjusts to the heterogeneity of its
components.
Let me illustrate this with the example of a global firm. Macdonalds is in trou-
ble today because its native market, the United States is contracting a little bit,
although the firm continues to grow in the rest of the world. Now from the point
of view of a U.S. nationalist, the Big Mac is part of the American way of life. Its
triumph is an aspect of the global triumph of the United States and its way of life,
its troubles in the United States raise all sorts of reflections about whiat is happen-
ing to the tastes and mores of the American people, not to mention to local
employment. On the other hand, from the strictly business point of view – and this
is the one which Macdonald’s managers and investors must take – the United
States is merely one market out of many, although naturally, being the biggest, its
troubles affect the share-price or profits more than do others. Now suppose that
Macdonalds could compensate for the decline in the U.S. market by a huge

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and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
2 Constellations Volume 5, Number 1, 1998

expansion of the Chinese market. Suppose even – for the sake of argument –that
Macdonalds, recognizing that there is no future in the United States, pursues the
shift to the Chinese market as the global strategy which maximizes its business
returns. Suppose, for tax reasons, it thinks of transferring its headquarters from
the United States to Curaçao. All this would make Senator Jesse Helms apoplec-
tic, but not the Wall Street analysts of global corporations. By the way, exactly
this is happening today (Oct. 22, 1997) with the transnational firm ABB, a
combined Swedish-Swiss operation, which is about to fire ten thousand of its
employees in the United States and Europe – not least in Sweden – because they
want to shift their center of gravity to Asia. Wages in Asia, by the way, are much
lower than in Sweden, Switzerland, or the United States.

2
But this example also illustrates the necessary coexistence between globality and
its heterogeneous components. Take an almost laboratory specimen of a global
operation, namely Coca Cola – an outfit which basically produces a single,
uniform product consumed in the same manner wherever it is sold. In fact, during
the great pioneering decades of globalization from the 1950s on, the standard
method of extending such a firm was by operating through local affiliates or fran-
chising, which left some scope for local autonomy. However, this was or is prob-
ably a transitional form on the long road to globalization. Technically a much
greater degree of globality is today conceivable. All the world’s Cokes could be
produced in 100% automated plants, distributed across the globe without any
reference to local interests and tastes, with the help of modern automatic infor-
mation technology under the direct supervision of a single, central direction in
Atlanta. And yet, even this would still, and for the foreseeable future, have to fit
in with local peculiarities which simply cannot be removed. Somewhere on the
road between the globally uniform coke-can and the roadside refreshment stand
in Ukraine or Bangladesh, the supermarket in Athens or in Djakarta, globalization
stops being uniform and adjusts to local differences, such as language, local
culture, or, for that matter, local politics – as in states which want to discriminate
against Coke because they regard it as part of American imperialism, and which
insist on separate, national colas.

3
But if globalization has to adjust to local particularities, of which “nations” are
an important subvariety, particularities are much more powerfully affected by
globalization and have to adjust to it or be eliminated by it. And this is the main
theme of my talk.
How they are affected depends on the relative strength of the obstacles to total
globalization or global uniformity. These are strongest in the field of power and

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 The Nation and Globalization: Eric Hobsbawm 3

politics, since up to the present “the world” does not exist as a political unit at all.
Only the so-called “nation-states” exist, although from time to time some of them
are powerful enough to have effective global policies or to set up global institu-
tions for certain special purposes. The United Nations (typically so named) illus-
trates this problem. It has no power of its own, apart from what is made available
by its members, and no single policy that cannot be sabotaged by one or more of
its members. Of course the effective state system today consists not of the two
hundred or so politically sovereign members of the United Nations and other
autonomous units, but of the relative handful of large, economically or militarily
powerful states. The existence of a collection of such states is the chief obstacle
in the way of further gloablization. The most obvious recent example is the
refusal of the United States to accept one of the few international agreements
genuinely accepted by everyone else, namely, the commitment to cut the emission
of greenhouse gases down to the required level. It has thus single-handed sabo-
taged a global measure.
The obstacles to globalization are weakest in techniques of communication,
and in the development of science and technology. Local particularities are irrel-
evant to these matters, and the capacity of power to inhibit the transmission and
development of ideas has diminished dramatically, not only because governments
trying to do so have become less common, but also because communications
technology is now almost impossible to keep under anyone’s control. Here “the
nation” or any other identity group is virtually eliminated. There is not such thing
as Islamic physics or Romanian mathematical logic, or black linguistics. It is the
same physics, mathematical logic or linguistics, whether practised by Mexicans
or Buddhists or people with straight black hair and slit eyes. The fact that some
kinds of people may do these things better than others has nothing to do with the
matter. Crystallography, for instance, is a science which, for reasons I do not fully
understand, has appealed particularly to women, who have been unusually distin-
guished at it – up to and including the Nobel prize level. But the activity in which
these women have distinguished themselves has no gender, and neither have its
findings. Science remains resolutely modernist, not postmodernist. One of the
oddest developments of our times has been the refusal of a number of intelligent
people in the academic world to accept this.
In fact, the traditional universalism of the sciences is such that increasingly
they also operate in a single global language. This affects “the nation” via
linguistic culture. Classical nationalism was largely a project to replace interna-
tional or accepted “culture languages” by vernaculars upgraded for all-purpose
use. This is the classical development from Dutch in the seventeenth century to
Czech, Flemish, Finnish and the rest in the 19th century. Catalan is a late exam-
ple of this. Classical nationalist campaigns hinge largely on the construction of
vernacular universities. The date when a Czech or a Welsh or a Flemish
University was established is a crucial date in the formation of those nations. But
today it is precisely some of the small languages whose superhuman efforts to

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4 Constellations Volume 5, Number 1, 1998

turn themselves into all-purpose languages at all academic levels were so success-
ful who find themselves by-passed. Much of university teaching in Holland and
Finland is now conducted in English. The Central European University in
Budapest operates in none of the regional languages but also in English. All
Ethiopian children past elementary school level get their instruction in English,
though there may be political arguments for this.
The economy is not quite so freely transnational, although some of it, like the
world currency market, operate outside and, apparently, beyond the control of
states altogether. The absurdity of introducing “national” considerations into it
has lately been demonstrated by the prime minister of Malaysia, who sees the fall
in the exchange value of his currency as the result of a plot by Jewish stock
exchange speculators such as George Soros, who cannot stand the idea that an
Islamic state is an economic success. Nevertheless, the world economy continues
to operate within the constraints of the state system in two ways. First, most of its
transactions still take place within the borders of states, that is to say as internal
trade and not as international trade (imports or exports). Second, it still remains
subject to varying extents to the laws, institutions and policies of state govern-
ments. (Of course governments, especially the smaller ones, also operate under
the constraints or temptations of the transnational economy, but right now this is
not our concern.) At present transnational economic units – i.e., typically the so-
called “multinationals” usually cannot override these obstacles. Their most char-
acteristic strategy so far is to side-step and by-pass them, in two ways. First, at
least chronologically, by shifting to an “offshore” base in one of the many mini-
states mostly left over from the disintegration of the old empires. “Divide and
rule” as the Romans said. This is to transform the national state system into a tool
for globalization. A nationalist Scottish friend of mine has passionately protested
against my contention that the ideal world for multinationals is one of no states,
or at least of small rather than large states, but the fact is undeniable. Unless it has
oil, the smaller the state, the weaker it is, and the less money it takes to buy its
government. Second, transnational operators develop their own institutions for
by-passing state laws – e.g., by global arrangements for inter-firm arbitration in
disputes over contracts and for overcoming the limitations of the single nation-
state, e.g., by developing global consultancy and credit-rating agencies; which,
incidentally, also determine the credit of governments. The closest thing to a
genuine world authority today is Standard & Poor. We are already at the stage
where virtually all financial control over large firms is in the hands of six world-
wide accountancy firms, and if current negotiations for mergers succeed, soon by
three such firms. Here I need only refer you to the work of Saskia Sassen on these
matters.
And yet, the basic structure of the global economy is increasingly separate
from, and cuts across the borders of, the world’s political structure. What we
have today is in effect a dual system, the official one of the “national
economies” of states, and the real but largely unofficial one of transnational

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 The Nation and Globalization: Eric Hobsbawm 5

units and institutions; the two are linked together at the edges by those transna-
tional economic institutions like the IMF and the World Bank which are both
global in their terms of reference, but still dependent on the state system, or rather
on the richest states within it, and especially on the United States. Moreover,
unlike the state with its territory and power, other elements of “the nation” can be
and easily are overridden by the globalism of the economy. Ethnicity and
language are the two obvious ones. Take away state power and coercive force,
and their relative insignificance is clear. Even religious identity, which imposed
prohibitions of genuine economic significance, like that of alcohol in Islam and
birth control in Catholic countries, is no longer what it once was. That ethnicity
has some economic impact as such is obvious – as we all know in New York, it
is the basis of flourishing niche markets. But by global standards this is chicken-
feed.
Somewhere between the extremes we must situate culture. Ever since the eigh-
teenth century the great thinkers dreamed of a single “world culture”, even a
“world literature” which would prevail with the spread of enlightenment and
globalization. Of course they were thinking primarily in terms of western (or any
other) educated, or even literate, minorities which formed a tiny fraction even of
the western population. (By the way it is not true that their idea of culture was
exclusively Eurocentric. It became Eurocentric simply because “the west,”
including western culture and arts, became the model for any kind of moderniza-
tion, so that the Khedive of Egypt showed his modernity by getting Verdi to write
an Italian opera on Egyptian themes (Aida), and Indian maharajas founded
universities on the British model and filled their palaces with western-type sculp-
ture as well as with elephant fountains). Such an elite world culture did come into
existence – wherever an opera house was built in the nineteenth century it looked
pretty much the same – and it even succeeded in overcoming the big hurdle of
language. In the nineteenth century a corpus of “world classics” evolved, which
were available to a fairly large public through translations. I first got to know
Dickens, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen and Diderot in the German transla-
tions of my grandparents’ and mother’s Viennese bookshelves.
But what we have in the twentieth century is a genuine world mass culture; i.e.,
one that is shared by every man, woman and child in, at least, the large part of the
world within daily, even hourly, reach of television, radio, tape, or compact disc-
player and video. In the old-fashioned sense of “culture” = the arts, it was essen-
tially formed in the United States, and distributed world-wide through the
industrial revolution in entertainment and based on two basic innovations, the
moving picture and the mechanical reproduction of sound. In the anthropological
sense of “culture,” namely a way of life, the pattern of consumer society is also
increasingly global, a function of the post-Second World War economy, though
actually it is much more generally occidental. Only some bits of it, such as the
universal vogue for wearing jeans, show a specifically American origin. Anyway,
national origin is not very important, nor are characteristics which may originally

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6 Constellations Volume 5, Number 1, 1998

have been national. Does it matter that Benetton comes from Italy, that the Body
Shop is British by birth, that the culture of Walkmans and camcorders comes from
Japan, or that I simply don’t know what country it is that gave birth to the GAP?
To some extent this global culture overrides, and even destroys, local cultures,
and is thus incompatible with national particularities. Nothing is more paradoxi-
cal than the young militants of the nationalists right in Europe who beat up
foreigners while dressed in the global uniform of their age-group – such as jeans
and T-shirts – listening to the transnational music of their generation, rock, and
doing so at soccer matches, which are the mass spectator sport in most countries
of the world, irrespective of race, color, creed and sexual orientation, though not
of gender. (The sports pages of the world continue to be read overwhelmingly by
males). The United States is a major exception. (Indeed, if I wanted to make a
case for the exceptionalism of the United States, I’d base it on this sort of
phenomenon.)
There is no doubt that certain types of national and regional culture have not
resisted the rise of global entertainment, partly because of the sheer economic
strength of the chief global producer (e.g., the United States’ movie industry),
partly because old local or national genres simply no longer appeal to younger
generations. If they survive at all, they retire into entertainment enclaves where
tourists still expect to hear or see “the real” Parisians of the past accompanied by
the “real French accordion music” or “the real flamenco.” At one time, after the
collapse of the great Hollywood studios in the late 1940s, it looked as though a
more pluralistic movie world would develop – but today once again 90 percent
of the movies shown in the world outside India and Japan once again come out of
the United States.
Actually, soccer today provides a beautiful demonstration of the conflict and
interaction of local, national and global elements in culture. On the one hand it
is based, like the Olympic Games, on a contest between nations: the World Cup.
On the other hand it is based on a contest between teams in theory based locally
and mobilizing local loyalties – as the Brooklyn Dodgers once did in baseball.
The local element is still there, but it is now secondary. Real team loyalty today
is concentrated on a handful of major teams in each country, which have become
heavily capitalized major economic enterprises, parts of the entertainments
industry, quoted on the stock exchange, etc. These teams have now developed an
international presence and an independent international competitive system in
Europe, such as the UEFA Cup and the Cupwinners Cup. With the rarest excep-
tions, they have lost their national, let alone their local, basis. They now recruit
transnationally, in competition with one another, so that the typical British or
Italian club will consist of star players from at least three continents and maybe
five or six countries – a Brazilian or two, a German, a Russian, an Argentinian.
(This is not so visible in North America, because the mass spectator sports here
are only played at the top level in very few countries – baseball in a few
Caribbean ones, ice-hockey in a few semi-arctic ones.) The logical development

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 The Nation and Globalization: Eric Hobsbawm 7

would be the emergence of transnational superleague of super-clubs.1 On the

other hand for the World Cup the national teams must still be essentially national.
Cantona, the French hero of Manchester United fans, has to play in the French
team. But has he? Will not the super-teams or the superstars decide that playing
in their own contest is more important than in the national one? That, after all, is
what the U.S. baseball authorities decided at the Barcelona Olympics, when they
played a second-rank team so as not to interfere with the U.S. league season. Such
are the complications of globality.
Nevertheless, as even the example of a global sport shows, in the field of
culture, identities, national or otherwise, must remain fairly central. Anyone
can check this in an international hotel, by zapping through the cable stations.
There is, of course, language – the great divider since the Tower of Babel. But
even leaving language aside, outside sports channels – and even there – the
various national programs cannot possibly be confused. Indeed tailoring the
product to specific markets is the logic of the global consumer economy in a
period when the world is rich, and hundreds, perhaps thousands of millions are
above the threshold of necessity, and live lives where shopping means buying
inessentials and luxuries. You can observe this diversification of a product in
recent years very nicely with coffee. It is only in the early stages of the mass
market, national or international, that absolute standardization is the optimal
global solution, when Henry Ford’s choice reigns: any color so long as its
black. True, most products on the global consumer market may be produced
by, or distributed by, a handful of global transnationals – but at the consumer
end globalization needs diversification, and nationality remains a permanent
element in it. So it will remain. It is not, it will not be, the old national tradi-
tion. Indeed, I would say that it is more likely to be the sort of curious
syncretism of national tradition with cultural imports and global elements
which we can see in the Hong Kong film industry: Hollywood westerns
married to Chinese martial arts.
What is more, the sheer advance of globality produces an almost inevitable
reaction against it, and in favor of the specific, the particular. The rise of iden-
tity groups is part of such a reaction. It is not necessarily political. Indeed, it is
quite likely to be cultural, although politics is needed to make it real, especially
in the case of small languages like Welsh, which could not possibly flourish
without public subsidies and without being given official status in schools and
official communications. For practical purposes they are not necessary. All
Welsh people are bilingual, 80 per cent of them are monolingual in English. That
is to say, outside a few thinly populated rural areas, it isn’t even a language for
domestic and family use. Yet the value of Welsh, even for those who do not
speak it, even for those who don’t want to be forced to speak it, is that it is some-
thing that shows that they are a small but special people. In the nineteenth
century, intelligent Welsh people might have been reconciled to the Darwinian
disappearance of their old language. Even the Scots, of whom only a few tens of

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8 Constellations Volume 5, Number 1, 1998

thousands understand Gaelic – which was never the majority language – would
not want to see it disappear. It symbolizes one component of being Scottish.
How important is this? Is it more important than other public indications of
belonging to some group – nation, locality, region or whatever? Let us say, the
insistence of emancipated and highly westernized Indian women on wearing
saris habitually, or, on a much smaller scale, of many rich Austrian ladies on
formal occasions on wearing dirndl costumes, or of middle class Bavarian men
on buying themselves and even wearing the traditional short leather pants
(lederhosen)? Perhaps not – unless it is made compulsory by state action, e.g.
by the language and educational policy of governments, generally of small
nation-states. In that case it may actually isolate the majority of the local popu-
lation from the potential benefits of participating in the wider supra-national
world. This is unlikely to affect English, which has probably established itself
permanently as the world’s second language. But it is quite likely to happen to
the major regional languages of intercommunication, like Spanish, Russian, and
conceivably Arabic.
Much more important is the question how far globalization will affect the
existing nation-state. The world will undoubtedly continue as a system of such
states, but it is unrealistic to think of “the nation-state” as a standard unit. At
one end there are the mini-states and statelets, which function almost entirely as
a device of the globalized economy – e.g., as tax-havens. What will happen
when globalization can do without them, I don’t know. They have nothing to
fall back on except tourism. Their number may increase. We then have a large
number of nation-states, particularly in Europe, whose future is obscure,
because they are visibly being squeezed between the supra-national and the
infra-national forces. Thus in Belgium a single nation-state has virtually ceased
to exist, Spain is breaking up into a collection of autonomous, even quasi-inde-
pendent regional units with a center whose new functions are not yet clear. The
future of Great Britain as Great Britain is open. Even the balance between
federal government and Laender in Germany is shaky since unification. And so
is their relation with the European Union, which has established a system of by-
passes from Brussels to the so-called “regions” – whose definition is also not
very clear.
Finally, at the other end of the spectrum, there is a handful of states so large in
terms of population, area, resources, and/or power that they can affect the global
economy single-handedly: the United States, Japan and China, perhaps also in
future India, belong to this group. To these we should add the unions of middling
states, of which the European Union is the exemplar. For economic purposes they
function to some extent as super-states, though in terms of international politics
they are of little significance. The major practical question before the world today
is whether these states – which constitute a consortium of something like the
“great powers” of the nineteenth century, but in economic rather than politico-
military terms – can act together sufficiently to control the global economy of the

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 The Nation and Globalization: Eric Hobsbawm 9

free market and its unforeseeable and potentially unmanageable and disastrous
consequences. I am pessimistic about this, but here is where decisions can be
made, if the will is there. I am afraid the future of the world depends on it.

NOTE
1. European Champions Cup Oct 23 1997 games: Teams from: ITALY (Parma, Juventus),
GERMANY (Borussia-Dortmund, Bayern Munich, Bayer Leverkusen,) TURKEY (Galatasaray,
Besiktas) ENGLAND (Manchester U, Newcastle) NETHERLANDS (Feyenoord of Rotterdam,
Eindhoven) FRANCE (Monaco, Paris-St Germain) SPAIN (Real Madrid, Barcelona) PORTUGAL
(Sporting Lisbon, FC Porto) UKRAINE (Dynamo Kiev), Czech (Sparta), NORWAY (Rosenborg),
SLOVAKIA (Kosice), GREECE (Olympiakos) SWEDEN (FC Goteborg)

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